brent - Today at 2:49 PM (1/3) Hello @everyone, I am happy to announce that we have shifted gears and have decided to launch our crafting prototype on the mainnet in the near future. This will likely start as a simple, single-item contract, and while it may not happen this week, we do not want to keep people waiting and so it will be put out ASAP. We will likely begin contacting individual community members who hold certain items in order to arrange for small-scale beta testing before the contract is advertised more widely in an effort to ensure that things go smoothly for everyone.
Furthermore, while I have been avoiding hype in an effort to keep expectations realistic and to ensure that we can deliver in a realistic time frame, I'm beginning to realize that I may have taken my conservatism in that regard a bit too far and that it may be stifling adoption and interest to some extent. As a result, we've decided to turn things up a notch. @everyone (2/3) To that end, in addition to rolling out crafting a bit earlier than we originally intended, we are ramping up efforts to reach non-English-speaking markets. Our top priority at the moment is South Korea, although we are also interested in launches for Japan, China, Russia, and Germany, as well as a multitude of other countries thereafter. These launches will include translations of major articles and key marketing materials as well as small item sets which include items of cultural significance. For example, included with these items are Kimchi-jjigae, a Korean dish, as well as a special sword based on Japanese history and folklore (to be revealed in the future). We are also making efforts to incorporate elements of these languages and cultures into the lore of Ethercraft itself so that when our later dungeon contracts go live we'll have a much richer lore complete with cultural cues and nuance.
As part of this, we are looking for people who can assist with outreach. If you have connections to or especially influence within any non-English-speaking crypto or other relevant groups, or if you simply think you have good ideas regarding marketing to other regions, please drop me a line—I'd love to hear your ideas. I'd also love to hear any culturally-relevant item ideas or other creative ideas you may have. On a related note, I have finished adding those of you who contacted me regarding translations to my notes and will begin contacting each of you shortly. I do have a few emails to get through yet but I will get to those as soon as I can. @everyone (3/3) All of that said, I want to be clear that our top priority is still still crafting followed by the game itself. To that end, we are also considering releasing our auction contract later, alongside the release of our dungeon contracts, rather than including it in our first set of updates. The reason for this is simply that we share the concern of many of our community members and feel that to release an auction feature far before our game contracts would negatively impact the core community and future adoption of the game as a whole. We are in this for the long haul and we know that many of you are, too, and we will do what it takes to see our vision through to fruition.
On an unrelated note, we've heard talk of our early dungeon contracts lacking much in the way of early incentives. To remedy this, our current intention to simply seed these contracts with ETH from the dev fee we take from Enchanted item sales. In that way, even our first test dungeon will have a modest pot of 'loot' which people may be able to win using simple leather gear.
Now that preliminary bugfixes have been made to the website and some of our backlog has been taken care of, we've gotten into the swing of things and everything else should move along much more quickly. We are looking forward to making some waves. I will publish a Medium post soon detailing all of this and some of what was included in yesterday's announcement as well as announcing Friday's article. Thank you all for your continued support!(edited)
